Monday, March 18, 2013

The Lord of the Flies, my first Goodreads review


There are some books that you wish you could read for the first time again and again. The feeling of that is so fleeting, and for many books, it is so awesome and magnificent. The Lord of the Flies is one of these books.

I remember that the first time I read it, I was in sixth grade, eleven years old, around the age of the boys on the island. My friends bugged me about reading such a weird book, and that was all good in tenth grade when we read it as a class. The thing about reading TLotF in sixth grade is that in sixth grade, everything is a little bit more frightening, and the reactions you get when you are eleven are more visceral, instantaneous than those you get in tenth, or in university, after you’ve been trained to analyze the text to shreds.

I can credit TLotF to my obsession with underlying religious subtext, religious iconography, the demons and devils in the characters and settings. Reading TLotF for the first time, I was struck with certain horrible things, since the back cover summary told me I should expect Swiss Family Robinson or something. I had a thing for island survival stories. This was when I still thought the CBS show Survivor was about…surviving.

The characters drive this story, and even though we had a foolish tenth grade assignment about drawing the map of the island, we knew that the characters were the focus. The first time around, I rooted for Piggy because he was smart. We didn’t need tenth grade English to tell us his glasses symbolized scientific, rational thought, or that fire meant hope. In some cases, overanalyzing, focusing on the minutiae fed to us by the curriculum killed the story for many people. Go with your gut, sixth grade me said. Maybe sixth grade me didn’t know any better.

I liked Simon and I liked Roger. I hated Jack because he was a bully, but admired the cruel and merciless Roger because (1) I was supposed to be named Roger and (2) sixth graders like the mean bad guy, but not the bad guy that could possibly pick on them at recess. And as the story progressed, the kids divided, the sixth grader realizes, holy crap, this isn’t a ‘what if I were on a deserted island’ story, but rather a model of sixth grade, and, as the tenth grader will realize, a model of society as a whole. There is no winning in this situation, except when acts of God intervene.

The other reviewers have probably picked the social commentary bit of this to pieces, so I’ll tackle the stuff I really got out of this allegory. If you’ve seen Inception, you’ll remember that one core theme is that an idea can take hold and proliferate uncontrollably, that concepts and thoughts are incomprehensibly powerful. We see this in the boys, choir boys many of them, who presumably quickly abandon their original Christian dogma once it appears that God has forsaken them. An almighty and merciful (or merciless) God can be substituted by a beast, the devil, Beelzebub, whatever. A dictator will suffice, if history teaches us correctly. Whatever.

The lessons it teaches an adolescent are very good. While I could have gotten a boatload of symbolism from the story (I actually wrote an in-class essay comparing the boys to fairy-tale and religious figures, which I got an A on) but that is not as useful as the concepts that hide behind the story. What it boils to is a very explicit treatise on human nature, reduced to a few figures that play their roles perfectly. It affirmed my idea that the conch method (in elementary school, we used popsicle sticks, in Breaking Bad, they used the talking pillow) will not work, and that kids, whether they’re reading literature whose themes are over their heads in middle school, or stranded on an island without adult supervision, are good models for how humankind will behave, stripped from their institutionalized knowledge and moral, ethical constraints.

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